Team Self-Updating scout database?

FIRST General Forum
1

Hello everyone,

Coming from the varsity policy debate world, I have an interesting question to ask. As policy debaters, our “tool of offense” is our negative strategy and our Affirmative (A Plan which aims to resolve the year’s topic, called the resolution). This wiki is a crucial part of the varsity field. Each team updates their own page on the wiki. They never delete anything and they openly provide teams with what their plan does (actually, this is almost all the citation of the evidence that they are reading off very fast](http://www.schooltube.com/video/3312/2007-Glenbrooks-Policy-Debate-Championship-Part-I)) In the debate culture, if any seasoned varsity debater talks about “the debate wiki” they know where to go. Why is this not a common thing for Robotics? We would have a very fitting use. It appears to me that we have to “scout” other teams for basic info like drive train and how it looks like and such.

Is this that some teams have felt? (Meaning, lack of freely available information for some team?) Is there just not a single place to consolidate this data?

I realize on-site scouting for strategy is important and should stay important but what is your opinion on a culture of FIRST where we don’t have to scourge the web just to see what a certain robot looks like?

Maybe I am totally being unreasonable, and if so, I understand. I just had an epiphany because as a debater, if I wanted to see which affirmative I would have to negate, it was on the web at that single site.

So, what do you think?

2

It seems like you are describing the FIRSTChat scouting system:
http://firstchat.ath.cx:81/resources/frc/scouting/

If all teams updated their pages here this sounds like it would be exactly what you describe.

3

I was aware of that website but it just appeared to me it wasn’t a “cultural part” of FIRST to be in habit of doing something like this.

4

I usually go around the pits on Thursday and take pictures of all the robots, then we have a picture of every robot. You might find pictures of 10% of the robots on the web before the competition…and the odds of more teams than that actually using a wiki are pretty slim (it’s been tried repeatedly).

As for scouting, in the past it’s been relatively easy to scout by recording the performance of each team on the field on Friday, and compiling the data Friday night, with some modification Saturday morning, and using that for alliance selection. This year scouting is going to be pretty challenging! but going on team performance, rather than robot construction charateristics, is still probably more helpful.